March Madness Day 3

The 2016 March Madness tournament has been predictably unpredictable. When 12 seed Yale beat 5th seeded Baylor, they seemed like the Cinderella story of the tournament. But wins by 13 seed Hawaii and 15th seed Middle Tennessee over #2 Michigan State have busted brackets galore.

If you’ve been following this blog, you know that Unanimous A.I. offered a $1000 prize to any individuals who can beat the best bracket generated by a “human swarm”. In a partnership with Marist College, Center for Sports Communication a set of 13 swarms were fielded, each with different characteristics, and each producing a unique bracket. The goal was to see if any of these swarms could outperform most people.

The question is, how are those swarms doing against the 159 individuals who submitted brackets for the $1000 prize. We can look at pure points, but honestly – with so many brackets having been busted by the Michigan State loss, it’s more useful to look at Possible Points to see how the contest is likely to shake out. The chart below shows the top 10% of brackets, ranked by their potential.

What you’ll see is that 5 of the 13 swarms are among those 10% individual performers. In other words, at the time of this writing, 90% of the individuals who submitted brackets would have been better off going with one of those 5 swarms rather than working alone. And 2 of those swarms are in the top 4%. In other words, the results so far are clearly demonstrating that many minds are better than one:

Of course we can also look at RAW POINTS and we find that the highest performing swarm is doing very well compared to the 159 individuals who are vying to beat the swarms. At the time of writing this, the top swarm was out performing 94% of the individuals in the contest. That’s remarkable, but as we’ve seen so far, things can change fast. Stay tuned…

There’s sure to be even more drama in the Round of 32. You can follow the action here on the blog, or sign up up below to try UNU for yourself.